I have no powder to burn killing Negroes. I intend to kill the radicals. I have told them this and more. There is not a radical leader in this town [Memphis] but is a marked man; and if trouble should break out, not one of them would be left alive. I have told them that they were trying to create a disturbance and then slip out and leave the consequences to fall upon the Negro; but they can’t do it. Their houses are picketed, and when the fight comes not one of them would ever get out of this town alive. We don’t intend they shall ever get out of the country.
Although he claimed in a letter to the Commercial and in later congressional testimony that he had been misquoted and in fact had never been a Klan member, many of his public pronouncements confirm the content of the interview and reflect his fervid views about the proper role of the Klan in the reconstructed South. Earlier he had addressed a crowd in Brownsville, Tennessee, in the same apocalyptic terms:
I can assure you, fellow citizens, that I, for one, do not want any more war. I have seen it in all its phases, and believe me when I say, that I don’t want to see any more bloodshed, nor do I want to see any Negroes armed to shoot down white men. If they bring this war upon us, there is one thing I will tell you—that I shall not shoot any Negroes so long as I can see a white Radical to shoot, for it is the Radicals who will be to blame for bringing on this war.
Forrest then went on:
But if they send the black men to hunt those Confederate soldiers whom they call kuklux, then I say to you, “Go out and shoot the radicals.” If they do want to inaugurate civil war, the sooner it comes the better, that we may know what to do.
Even after his official order to disband the formal Klan, Forrest still made it known that he approved of the general policy of terrorizing any who attempted to implement the aims of Reconstruction. In early 1870, a year after Forrest’s purported disassociation from the Klan, Republican probate judge William T. Blackford was attacked in his home in Greensboro, Alabama. Over sixty Klansmen surrounded his house. Blackford in desperation immediately asked Forrest for clemency and protection—again evidence of the generally held belief that Forrest still controlled such night riders. After initially saving his life, Forrest nevertheless advised the judge to leave the South, remarking in explanation of his sudden departure that “he had given bad advice to the Negroes, and kept them in confusion, and off the plantations.” Indeed, well after the official “end” of the Klan, Congress passed in 1870–71 a series of anti–Ku Klux Klan acts that equated the Klan with treason and allowed the President to ignore habeas corpus to hunt down suspected members. Congress clearly was reacting to the terrorist activity that continued or even accelerated well after Forrest’s much publicized termination of the klaverns.
What, then, made the Klan so much more resilient and dynamic than numerous other hate organizations in American history? The answer lies not in its ideology per se, which was shared by many other racist groups. Rather, the Klan spread so rapidly due to its grassroots appeal to working middle- and lower-class whites, who saw its message as populist and reactive rather than merely hateful and xenophobic. The planning of assassinations, lynchings, and torture of targeted individuals also created a general climate of terror that no one was safe from the “invisible” empire. Klansmen postured as protectors of the working poor, defenders who feared the elevation of the blacks as threats both to their jobs and to their sense of privilege. Forrest told congressmen in 1871 that the Klan had arisen for just such a noble purpose. “My understanding is that those men who were in the organization were young men mostly; men who had been in the southern army, and men who could be relied upon in case of difficulty—of an attack from the Negroes—who could be relied upon to defend the women and children of the country.”
Forrest further took pains to paint the rise of the Klan as a necessary unifying bulwark for the defenseless:
There was a great deal of insecurity felt by the southern people. There were a great many northern men coming down here, forming leagues all over the country. The Negroes were holding night meetings; were going about; were becoming very insolent and the southern people all over the state were very much alarmed. I think many of the organizations did not have any name; parties organized themselves so as to be ready in case they were attacked. Ladies were ravished by some of the Negroes, who were tried and put in the penitentiary, but were turned out in a few days afterward. There was a great deal of insecurity in the country, and I think this organization was got up to protect the weak, with no political intention at all.
In Forrest’s mind—and this would become a hallmark of Klan ideology—the “Negroes,” not whites, were the aggressors. His organization was not offensive but simply defensive, formed to safeguard downtrodden poor Southerners from hostile blacks and their Union allies. Forrest himself had been born into poverty and had a natural affinity for the white poor, prompting Gen. Viscount Wolseley to suggest that his bleak upbringing—“what Napoleon termed the best of military schools, that of poverty”—was critical to his later military success. Forrest, the antiaristocrat and underappreciated general, understood perfectly the nature of the class resentment in Southern culture that became more manifest in the closing years of the Civil War—a seething of the nonslaveholding poor who had died on behalf of the rich plantation class and their wishes to protect Negro slavery.
In the immediate postwar years and before he entered into a series of entrepreneurial partnerships, Forrest helped draw on this rising Southern hatred toward Northern “radicals,” who were trying to take the last vestige of pride—superiority over the Negro—away from the white Southern lower classes. “During the war our servants remained with us and behaved very well,” Forrest admitted to the congressional inquiry, “but when the war was over our servants began to mix with the Republicans, and they broke off from the Southern people, and were sulky and insolent.” That the Klan ostensibly became an organization of the masses, who in the short-term were not worried about endangering the influx of Northern cash or necessarily the efforts of the Confederate officer corps to regain their citizenship, was in part due to its first president, whose renegade past and unorthodox career gained him rapport across class lines.
Forrest himself was far more than an illiterate former slave trader. Beside his brilliant military record he was a cagey student of politics. His speeches and dictated letters in the decade after the Civil War reveal a constant theme of aggrieved whites, who alone were following the original intent of the Constitution against revolutionary efforts of radical New England Republicans to change the very nature of the federal government. In his way of thinking, he was not violating the laws of the United States inasmuch as the Northern-dominated Congress had consistently adopted legislation that was at odds with the spirit of the Founding Fathers. His folksy mixture of half-educated populism, grievances against Northern banks and insurance companies and their carpetbagger and scalawag hirelings, and threats to kill and return to the battlefield if need be, helped give the Klan its trademark character of unrepentant grievance for a forgotten constituency.
Under Forrest the Klan settled in on a pattern of predictable behavior: nighttime attacks on blacks coupled with daytime disavowals of violence. In his infamous interview with the Cincinnati Commercial, Forrest was canny in emphasizing the Klan’s benevolent image. “I am not an enemy to the Negro. We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have; and more than that, I would sooner trust him than the white scalawag or carpetbagger.” Again, the irony is that Forrest’s own efforts at organizing resistance to Reconstruction were undermining his private plans to enlist Northern money in his own various farming and rail projects. When he realized that his public pronouncements to garner help from the North were at odds with his secretive life in the Klan, he seems to have attempted either to hide or end his active prominent role—perhaps a belated admission of his own culpability for a mass movement that had harmed the reputation of a struggling South.
No doubt the Klan or something like it would have emerged from the ashes of the Confederacy had Nathan Bedford Forrest either remained in obscurity as a lowly colonel on sentinel duty at the “damned” Lick Creek, or had a Union bullet at Fallen Timbers plowed a few more inches into the interior of his spinal column—or had the later renowned Forrest not agreed in 1867 to be the organization’s first president. But without the prestige of Forrest as its initial national leader, the incipient Klan would have remained a different, far more fringe and ineffectual organization—something like the ephemeral Order of the White Camellia, without either the pretensions of political legitimacy or broad class appeal. The Klan, after all, also bragged among its members a handful of other ex-Confederate generals like Zebulon Vance, Wade Hampton, and John B. Gordon. But in most cases such boasts were either groundless or, if true, made no difference to the Klan’s spread, given most ex-officers’ lack of a popular following among middling Southerners or any rapport with the poor.
With Forrest it was a completely different case. He had gained a huge audience and possessed the temperament and skill to galvanize grassroots support. Lee was correct that no Southerner was better equipped to lead a large number of dedicated followers. His career as devilish marauder in the Civil War lent a natural aura to the Klan’s trademark early practice of nocturnal rides of stealth and terror. Forrest himself may well have recoiled at the Klan’s descent into murder and riot. And had he lived, he may well have been appalled at the later rebirth of the Klan as an exclusively racist organization—although his grandson became cyclops of the Atlanta Klavern Number One in 1921, an office gained largely through the prestige of his founding ancestor. But the very legacy of the Ku Klux Klan as America’s premier hate group was in large part due to Nathan Bedford Forrest’s own excessive temperament and unapologetic determination to return the South to its antebellum racial culture, to shoot down Northern radicals, and restart the Civil War if necessary in the process.
Forrest’s career, like Sherman’s, took off only after Shiloh and his remarkable charge into the Hornet’s Nest, his late-night scouting of the Federal reinforcements, and his heroism in the final melee at Fallen Timbers. Just weeks earlier his sound advice at Fort Donelson had been ignored, and he was generally considered an iconoclastic nuisance to the Union Army rather than a military genius to whom a significant theater of cavalry operations might be entrusted. Guard duty at Lick Creek was completely in line with his previous commands. Only his precipitous charges at Shiloh freed him from that obscurity and at last allowed his genius to emerge.
Just as Sherman was also attacked first in the battle and fought last, so too Forrest seems to have never slept through the two days before being the last man shot at Shiloh. Each was repeatedly nearly killed in his reckless efforts to ward off catastrophe and thereby emerge from either shame or obscurity. Such aggression at Shiloh had brought Forrest success while the indecisiveness of Beauregard and the unimaginativeness of Bragg spelled defeat for his cause. From Shiloh, Forrest learned of the poverty of Southern generalship and the wisdom of his own aggressive brand of war. The battle made him famous, but famous in a particular manner as one at odds with rather than as part of the Confederate command.
His independence and success at Shiloh gave Forrest the confidence to act on his own and as he saw fit, and so turned him into a rebel within a rebel movement. And when that rebel government collapsed and left disaster in its wake, its most loyal and competent outsider rightly gained further credence without culpability. No wonder Lee was reported to have turned down the leadership of the controversial Klan and suggested Forrest instead; even if the myth has no historical basis, it reflects general Southern perceptions that a tired Lee was above such a controversial terrorist group, and that a precipitous and unabashed Forrest who had personally killed dozens of men was not only not bothered by such an unorthodox organization, but also far better suited and eager to lead it out of local oblivion.
Forrest—slave trader, veteran of duels, overseer of executions, and killer of twenty-nine bluecoats in battle—had once been praised by the Southern military aristocracy for his undeniable service to the cause, but also been denied command commensurate with his unmatched military genius due to his controversial background and near illiteracy (not to mention his dangerous temper and reckless speech). So in the same fashion the Klan would serve the interest of an unrepentant South, which nevertheless publicly shied away from open association with the organization’s repugnant methods of whippings, beatings, torture, lynchings, and murder.
There were many ripples from Forrest’s heroism at Shiloh—both his subsequent short-term successes in prolonging the war in Tennessee and his lasting contributions to the idea of war as blitzkrieg (“firstest with the mostest”). It is no accident, for example, that Gen. George S. Patton, also a fan of the great marches of William Tecumseh Sherman, saw in Forrest brilliance unmatched by any other American general and may well have drawn inspiration from close study of his Tennessee campaigns. But rightly or wrongly, the legacy of Forrest has reverberated now for more than a century, most prominently through the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—a terrorist clique that rode at night with the same fervor and unapologetic violence as had once before its first grand wizard against Union intruders.
I end with an anecdote of a visit to Memphis in February 1999. On a cold February afternoon, I encountered not more than a half dozen visitors in the warmth of the Civil Rights Museum, now incorporating the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In contrast, outside in the wind and rain at the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the city’s central park I counted at least ten visitors, as well as flowers lying at its base. The public perhaps recognizes a ripple of Shiloh that military historians often overlook.
Postmortem
“The South never smiled again after Shiloh,” wrote the New Orleans diarist George Washington Cable. However, in the battle’s immediate aftermath it at least breathed a sigh of relief. General Halleck soon arrived to assume command from Grant of a huge force of invasion and then proceeded to fritter away any opportunity of destroying Beauregard’s retreating army by a ponderous and dilatory march on a soon-to-be-evacuated Corinth, Mississippi. Still, if Shiloh did not lead immediately to a Southern collapse in the West, the undeniable Union victory left the Mississippi open. Soon a reassigned Grant lost no time in assembling his Shiloh veterans for an assault on Vicksburg. Yet, despite the undeniable strategic significance of the Union victory, the enduring fascination with Shiloh lies elsewhere, in the human story of the soldiers who fought there.
The two-day battle destroyed two generals—Lew Wallace and Albert Sidney Johnston—and created the careers of two others, William Tecumseh Sherman and Nathan Bedford Forrest, with murderous consequences for their poor adversaries in the years to come. Many of the Civil War’s military luminaries on both sides were also involved—Grant, Bragg, Beauregard, Halleck, and Buell. Two future presidents—Grant and Garfield—were veterans of the battle, along with a former vice president of the United States, John Breckinridge. The future navigator of the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell, lost an arm at Shiloh, and the Confederate Henry Morton Stanley, of later Stanley and Livingston fame, was captured there. Both felt that their later careers were formed in part by what they had seen and done at the battle. Was the human drama of Shiloh, then, in some ways different even from the larger and more momentous collision at Gettysburg, or the more murderous hours at Antietam or Cold Harbor?
Perhaps. While it was not the deadliest engagement of the national conflict, Shiloh was the first real carnage of the Civil War, a bloodbath in which there were nearly 24,000 combined Union and Confederate casualties. Of the some 110,000 who fought over the two days, nearly one in four men was missing, captured, wounded, or dead by Tuesday morning, April 8, 1862. In fact, there were more casualties in two days of fighting at Shiloh than in the combined total of all of America’s wars up to that time—the Revolution, Indian conflicts, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the battles of 1861 and early 1862.
Due to the relatively small circumference of the battlefield, the inclement rain followed by unaccustomed heat, the two-day duration of the intense killing, and the inability of both sides to care for the wounded and dead, the battlefield was a macabre nightmare of stinking blood, flesh, and mud that left an indelible impression on all who fought there. And hundreds of reporters and sightseers sailed up in the battle’s aftermath to survey the killing field. Adjacent to the Tennessee River and near to both Union and Confederate populations, Shiloh was an easy battle to reach for both sides; in addition, the melodrama of the first day’s Confederate advance followed by a stunning Union recovery made good copy and invited speculation on how the Confederates lost their first-day gains—and why Grant’s victorious army was almost lost in the first few hours of the fighting.
The nation and the world were shocked by the butcher’s bill, as newspapers and politicians rushed to assess blame, creating heroes and then demolishing them in a matter of days as contradictory reports from the confusing two-day slugfest trickled in for months afterward. Something or someone—Grant? Sherman? Wallace? Beauregard?—surely had to be responsible for the needless carnage, especially when the realization set in that after thousands of casualties, both sides claimed victory and neither army was really routed.
The sheer scale and unpredictability of the Western theater also made its first decisive battle utterly unique. Unlike the rather static front between Washington and Richmond, the West was a vast landscape where armies marched hundreds of miles to capture key cities like Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, seeking to turn entire border states such as Kentucky and Missouri into constant battlegrounds and wrestling over control of hundreds of miles of the Mississippi. A single set battle might open up or close down thousands of square miles of territory and thereby send whole states into the Union or Confederate camp—unlike the seesaw fighting in the quagmire of northern Virginia.
More important, Shiloh was the first full-scale battle in which rifled musket fire and canister shot on a large scale had ripped apart charges of heroic soldiers, shocking officers and enlisted men alike—and establishing the principle that the courage of running head-on against the enemy could be as suicidal as it was lunatic. Shiloh first took the glory out of battle. In forty-eight hours it dispensed with the idea that a single set engagement might settle the Civil War. Both sides learned that a day’s killing might so disable an army that even the victors could not really dominate their adversaries given the huge parameters of theater war in the West. No wonder nightmares of the battle grew rather than diminished in the minds of veterans on both sides, despite the even greater killing to come.
The focus in the energy of the country had also shifted from east to west in the years before the war. It was no accident that presidents, novelists, and great generals to come were all assembled on the Tennessee River. Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and the Western Confederacy of Texas, Tennessee, and the Mississippi River states were where the great transformations in American life were taking place, as the railroads, the nascent industry surrounding the Great Lakes, the frontier, and the Mississippi River all drew the most audacious and talented Americans of the mid-nineteenth century. So it was natural that among the tens of thousands of such men who met each other at Pittsburg Landing were dozens who would go on to change radically the course of American history—but only after they themselves were first changed by Shiloh.